Written by Alexis R. Santos-Lozada, Pennsylvania State University | Print | Email

Even before this year’s devastating hurricane season, the team of demographers I work with at Penn State and the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics had predicted that the population of Puerto Rico would decline over the next few decades.

More than 95% of people still eat meat and don’t like being told that it is wrong and bad for the planet to do so. But it is now well established that meat production is responsible for a substantial proportion of human greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention issues around animal welfare.

Around the globe, about 815 million people – 11 percent of the world’s population – went hungry in 2016, according to the latest data from the United Nations. This was the first increase in more than 15 years.

Melting of Antarctica’s ice can trigger rapid warming on the other side of the planet, according to our new research which details how just such an abrupt climate event happened 30,000 years ago, in which the North Atlantic region warmed dramatically.

Some aspects of climate change could benefit certain forms of agriculture in the Northeastern United States, new research suggests—though the researchers caution that there are many variables in the future scenario they envision.

There has been no let up since Hurricane Harvey dumped record-breaking rains on the Houston area of Texas. Hurricane Irma lashed parts of the Caribbean and Cuba and devastated the Florida Keys and the state’s west coast.

What we believe and how we act don’t always stack up. Recently, in considering what it means to live in a post-truth world, I had cause to examine my understanding of how the world works and my actions on sustainability.

Written by Andrew King, University of Melbourne; et al | Print | Email

Australia’s summer is officially over, and it’s certainly been a weird one. The centre and east of the continent have had severe heat with many temperature records falling, particularly in New South Wales and Queensland.

Written by Richard Butler and Andrew Jones, University of Birmingham | Print | Email

After lying largely forgotten in a museum for decades, a set of fossilised footprints have revealed a new glimpse of the world when reptiles began taking over from amphibians as the dominant land animals.

President-elect Donald Trump has been unclear so far on how many of his campaign pledges he actually intends to see through. Hopeful Democrats and moderates have clung to this uncertainty as reason to hope that a Trump presidency wouldn’t be as bad as they feared.

Written by Barbara Neumann, University of Kiel and Sylvia Szabo, University of Southampton | Print | Email

The consequences of climate change are already being felt all over the globe. But some regions are particularly affected. These so-called “hotspots” are areas where strong physical and ecological effects of climate change come together with large numbers of vulnerable and poor people and communities.

The high ambition of the Paris Agreement, to limit global warming to “well below 2°C”, was driven by concern over long-term sea level rise. A warmer climate inevitably means melting ice – you don’t need a computer model to predict this, it is simple common sense.

Written by Brett Scheffers, University of Florida and James Watson, The University of Queensland | Print | Email

More than a dozen authors from different universities and nongovernmental organizations around the world have concluded, based on an analysis of hundreds of studies, that almost every aspect of life on Earth has been affected by climate change.

Bolivia’s glaciers have shrunk by more than 40% in the past few decades. This puts further pressure on an already stressed water supply, while the meltwater lakes left behind risk collapsing in sudden and catastrophic outburst floods.

Written by La Monica Everett-Haynes, University of Arizona | Print | Email

The destructive nature of Hurricane Matthew—which resulted in hundreds of deaths in Haiti, dozens more in the US, and extensive damage still being assessed—was a test of strength in communications systems, infrastructure, and ultimately the resilience of communities.

New York City can expect nine-foot floods, as intense as the one produced by 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, at least three times more frequently over the next century—and possibly as much as 17 times more frequently, say researchers.

Southern Africa is noted for its wealth of biological diversity and for its high proportion of endemic species. These are species that are unique to a specific location and are found nowhere else in the world. Many of the region’s endemic species can be found in South Africa’s fynbos and succulent Karoo biomes.

Written by Alexander Arkhipkin, University of Aberdeen | Print | Email

Squid, octopus and cuttlefish populations are booming across the world. These fast-growing, adaptable creatures are perfectly equipped to exploit the gaps left by extreme climate changes and overfishing, according to a study colleagues and I published in the journal Current Biology.

Written by Anthony LeRoy Westerling, University of California, Merced | Print | Email

Dramatic images of out-of-control wildfires in western North American forests have appeared on our television and computer screens with increasing regularity in recent decades, while costs of fire suppression have soared.

Written by Simon Albert, The University of Queensland; Alistair Grinham, The University of Queensland; Badin Gibbes, The University of Queensland; Javier Leon, University of the Sunshine Coast, and John Church, CSIRO | Print | Email

Sea-level rise, erosion and coastal flooding are some of the greatest challenges facing humanity from climate change.

Written by Aimée Slangen, Postdoctoral research fellow, Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research | Print | Email

Global average sea level has risen by about 17 cm between 1900 and 2005. This is a much faster rate than in the previous 3,000 years. The sea level changes for several reasons, including rising temperatures as fossil fuel

Written by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Director, Global Change Institute, The University of Queensland | Print | Email

As we write, the much-cherished Great Barrier Reef is experiencing the devastating effects of coral bleaching. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has declared severe coral bleaching underway on the reefs north of Cooktown.

At the Paris climate summit, delegates have struck an agreement that calls for the world to “hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5℃”.

Written by Mark Gibbs, Queensland University of Technology | Print | Email

Coastal communities around the world are being increasingly exposed to the hazards of rising sea levels, with global sea levels found to be rising faster over the past two decades than for the bulk of the 20th century.

Written by Jessica Hellmann, University of Minnesota and David Ackerly, University of California, Berkeley | Print | Email

The world is watching as refugees flood into a Europe unprepared for the new arrivals. Conflict and social unrest due in part to climate stress – including induced food shortages and social conflict – have prompted migrants to search for new homes and new opportunities. To ecologists, however, this comes as no surprise.

Written by Laurence Padman, Earth and Space Research; Fernando Paolo, and Helen Amanda Fricker, University of California, San Diego | Print | Email

Ask people what they know about Antarctica and they usually mention cold, snow and ice. In fact, there’s so much ice on Antarctica that if it all melted into the ocean, average sea level around the entire world would rise about 200 feet, roughly the height of a 20-story building.

Written by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, The University of Queensland | Print | Email

This week, scientists registered their concern that super-warm conditions are building to a point where corals are severely threatened across the tropical Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans. They did so after seeing corals lose colour across the three major ocean basins – a sign of a truly momentous global change.